Bob Dole's war record -- and Bill Clinton's lack of one -- has become
a major theme in Dole's drive for the presidency. According to Katharine
Seelye in The New York Times, the G.O.P. strategy is to portray
Clinton as "the baby boomer in the White House, who was not born until
1946, a year after Mr. Dole had earned two Bronze Stars, and who skirted
service in his own generation's war."

Dole doesn't talk much about his wartime exploits, beyond his references
to the grievous wounds he suffered and his long, painful course of rehabilitation.
Despite his reticence, and to some extent because of it, the widespread
belief has grown up that his military service was exemplary, even heroic.

The Republican Party propaganda machine blows wind on the flame. In
a recent G.O.P. fundraising letter that Dole signed (though surely did
not write), the following statement appears: "And when I was asked to lead
my men up a rocky hill in Italy into the roaring guns and mortar fire of
the German Wehrmacht my sense of duty never wavered." The Dole for
President homepage on the Internet describes his feats in thrilling terms.

Most journalistic accounts of Dole's wartime experience pass along,
without questioning, the versions from several biographies, some based
on interviews with him; some from interviews with the same soldiers who
were interviewed for those books; some from the autobiography Dole wrote
with his wife, Elizabeth, The Doles: Unlimited Partners, an updated
version of which was published in time for the campaign; and some from
G.O.P. campaign literature. Although these sources sometimes contradict
one another, the following composite picture of Dole's combat exploits
emerges:

In 1942, at the age of 19, Dole immediately answered his country's call.
He joined the Reserves but soon asked to be placed on active duty.

His unit was constantly under fire.

Dole's company was known as a "suicide squad" because of the unusually
heavy casualties it took.

His men considered him an aggressive, "recklessly brave" leader.

Slightly wounded on a night patrol by a grenade, he returned to lead his
platoon on a second patrol only two days later.

In a major offensive on April 14, 1945, Dole's platoon sergeant was ordered
by the company commander to lead a rifle squad in an assault on a German
machine-gun nest, but Dole ignored the order and led the attack himself.

He was gravely wounded by enemy shrapnel while trying to drag his wounded
radioman into a shell hole.

Dole's leadership qualities played a significant role in cracking the Germans'
mountain defenses.

For his "heroism under fire," he was awarded two Bronze Stars.

Yet all of the above is either untrue or exaggerated. Dole's first wound,
in the night patrol, was self-inflicted (a story the candidate once told
himself), but that fact does not appear in an extremely laudatory profile
the G.O.P. distributes with a cover letter by Dole. And the factoid that
Dole got two Bronze Stars for heroism is circulated without evidence of
dates and citations. All this is not to suggest that Dole failed to perform
his duties honorably, or that he does not deserve respect and sympathy
for the terrible wounds he suffered and his courage in living a productive
life in spite of the resultant damage. But as a veteran of the 10th Mountain
Division and the 85th Mountain Infantry Regiment in which Dole served,
I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with efforts to cast him as a wartime
hero. Let's examine the Dole military myth piece by piece:

Dole rushed to the colors. As David Corn and Paul Schemm
report [see elsewhere in this issue], Dole put off being sent to the combat
zone until 1945. His reason for joining the Army's Enlisted Reserve Corps
was in all probability the same as mine and other college students': to
defer induction into the military.

Front Man?DavidCorn
and Paul Schemm

At the official Dole campaign Web site,
a section titled "World War II: Heroism and Tragedy" describes Dole's entry
into the military thus: "In 1942 at the age of 19, Bob Dole answered the
call to serve his country by joining the Army to fight in World War II."
Many press accounts have presented a similar story line: The young Dole
leaves school and heads right off to war. Yet Dole, as reflected in Army
records, answered the call reluctantly and then held a series of positions
that kept him far from combat until the final months of the war.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941,
millions of Americans volunteered for service. Dole, an 18-year-old freshman
at the University of Kansas, did not. On December 1, 1942, the Selective
Service mailed Dole a questionnaire that would be used to determine his
classification. Days after receiving that questionnaire--essentially a
pre-draft notice--Dole signed up. But, according to Selective Service records,
he entered the Army's Enlisted Reserve Corps, not the regular Army. In
Unlimited
Partners, Dole acknowledges but doesn't explain how he ended up in
the Reserves. His campaign declined to respond to a query on the matter.
By joining the Reserves, Dole could remain a student at a time when no
general education deferment existed.

As the war continued, Dole was able to finish his
sophomore year. Then on June 1, 1943, he was ordered to active duty. In
November, after finishing basic training for the medical corps, Dole joined
the Army Specialized Training Program, open to soldiers under the age of
22 who scored well on the military intelligence aptitude test. His military
records do not indicate whether he was assigned to the A.S.T.P. or applied
for entrance. This is another question his campaign would not answer. As
an A.S.T.P participant, Dole studied engineering at Brooklyn College until
the spring of 1944. Dole next moved to Camp Polk, Louisiana, and then transferred
to Camp Breckenridge, Kentucky, for more training, now as an antitank gunner.
He applied to officer training school in Fort Benning, Georgia, and finished
the program as a second lieutenant, entering active duty again in November
1944. The next month, he shipped off to Italy.

Once in a theater of war, Dole, by his own admission,
sought to duck combat as an infantryman. He told his friend Noel Koch that
he longed for a posting to an Army sports unit in Rome; a former Kansas
University trainer tried but failed to get Dole into this unit, according
to Richard Ben Cramer's Bob Dole. Unfortunately for Dole, the Army
already had plans for him. In February 1945 Dole was handed one of the
war's lousiest assignments: replacement lieutenant for a combat unit. Seven
weeks after he took over a platoon, he was gravely wounded.

The unvarnished record shows that Dole did not rush
off to war, as the compressed legend presented by his political allies
and lieutenants has it. Taking a hesitant approach to war is not uncommon,
nor is it necessarily a character flaw. But apparently in this instance
it's a reality unsuitable for inclusion in a campaign bio.

Dole's unit was constantly under fire. In Senator for
Sale, Stanley Hilton quotes Dev Jennings, one of the sergeants in Dole's
platoon, as saying that I Company was "pretty much under fire all the time"
from the day Dole joined the unit to April 14, the day he was wounded. Hilton
goes on to say that "I Company served as the spearhead of attack [the forward
troops who always push ahead of the rest of the army], often encountering
Germans ensconced in dugouts on the sides of the rugged mountains."

What does Dole say? He writes that he arrived to take up his assignment
on "the morning of February 25." But he never mentions that the 10th Mountain
Division went on a second offensive March 3-6, suffering 549 casualties,
among them the famed U.S. ski-jump champion Torger Tokle. I/85 played only
a reserve role in this advance, which may explain Dole's failure to mention
it. Dole's 3rd Battalion suffered virtually no casualties.

At any rate, the 10th, which had been badly bloodied in the major February
19-25 offensive that dislodged German troops entrenched on Monte Belvedere,
was gearing up for another attack on the still formidable German lines.
Dole writes in his autobiography that his "chief task was finding ways to
keep everyone busy: cleaning weapons, doing calisthenics, going on patrol."
For the next month and a half we were hunkered down in foxholes and bunkers,
rarely seeing anyone, even good friends, outside our own platoon or squad
(one reason I never met Dole). During this time, I Company was subjected
to shelling and machine-gun fire while on front-line duty, but it was not
under constant fire, any more than were the other companies in the division.
The commanding general instituted a policy of rotating one battalion at
a time to a rest area; individual soldiers were also given one-week leaves
to cities like Rome. As for Sergeant Jennings's description of I Company
as the "spearhead of attack," during March and early April of 1945, the
division was in defensive positions and hardly "spearheading" anything.

Dole's company was known as a "suicide squad." Citing Dole
as a source, Hilton writes that I Company was known as a suicide squad because
of the high rate of casualties it suffered. Recently, The Dallas Morning
News passed along this legend, describing Dole as "a young lieutenant
with a crack combat division...known as the 'suicide squad.'... [He was]
a particularly brave and even reckless officer." But Capt. John Woodruff,
in his official history of the 85th Regiment, writes that in the fighting
up to this point it was the 2nd Battalion of that regiment that suffered
the heaviest casualties. In the April 14-15 offensive in which Dole participated,
L Company of the 3rd Battalion took the worst beating, experiencing "more
casualties than any other Company in the Division from the time the Division
arrived in Italy until the surrender," though I Company was certainly hard
hit. Both Frank Carafa and Al Nencioni, sergeants in Dole's company, deny
that it was ever referred to by others in the 10th as a suicide squad, though
both were shocked by the casualties suffered in the April offensive.

Dole's men considered him an aggressive, courageous leader.
In talking to Hilton, Nencioni (who told me he was responsible for directing
mortar squads in the 4th platoon -- the weapons platoon) recalled Dole as
an especially brave officer who showed no hesitation in going into combat.
Jennings told Kansas City Star reporter Jake Thompson that "the lieutenant
was brave. . . he'd walk out to men on post at the front line even though
he did not have to." Stan Kuschick, for a time the platoon's senior sergeant,
called Dole "the best combat leader the platoon had." But at this point,
Dole's combat leadership qualities were still undemonstrated.

The only truly aggressive actions Dole is known to have engaged in after
his arrival and before the April 14 attack were two night patrols for the
purpose of taking prisoners. Neither accomplished its mission. According
to regimental historian Woodruff's account, "Co 'I' sent out an ambush patrol
at 1900 17 March of 16 men, led by Lt. Dole. An ambush was set...with part
of the patrol and the rest moved forward. Enemy MG [machine gun] and mortar
fire suddenly opened up on the patrol, inflicting 4 light casualties. No
prisoners were taken but one German was killed or badly wounded. The patrol
was forced to withdraw because of mortar fire." Two nights later, Woodruff
states, Dole led another patrol but ran into a Company K patrol engaged
in a firefight with the enemy and halted. "Later they were fired upon, and
thinking it might be the Co 'K' patrol, Lt Dole withdrew to prevent a clash
of friendly forces."

The three men quoted above, along with Frank Carafa (who served for a time
as Dole's immediate subordinate), are the four people most often interviewed
about Dole by biographers; all agreed that he was a good guy, unassuming,
respectful of their advice, popular with his men. There is no reason to
dispute this. Dole was evidently soft-spoken and willing to listen to those
with greater combat experience. As a green replacement taking over a unit
that had been through some severe fighting, listening to the veterans and
learning from them was in his own interest.

Dole's first wound. It was in the first of these night
patrols that Dole received the wound for which he was awarded his first
Purple Heart. He ruefully confesses in his 1988 autobiography that his wound
was self-inflicted: "As we approached the enemy, there was a brief exchange
of gunfire. I took a grenade in hand, pulled the pin, and tossed it in the
direction of the farmhouse. It wasn't a very good pitch (remember, I was
used to catching passes, not throwing them). In the darkness, the grenade
must have struck a tree and bounced off. It exploded nearby, sending a sliver
of metal into my leg -- the sort of injury the Army patched up with Mercurochrome
and a Purple Heart." The wound was so minor that he led another patrol two
nights later. He does not mention that others were also injured by his misguided
throw -- which Woodruff's account attributes to an enemy machine gun.

Dole's version seems to have gotten chewed up in the myth-making machinery.
Richard Ben Cramer, in his book Bob Dole, is the only one of the
biographers to give Dole's account. Hilton says only that Dole "suffered
a slight leg wound in March 1945, and earned a Purple Heart, but he went
right on leading his platoon." In his 1994 biography Bob Dole: The Republicans'
Man for All Seasons, Thompson, the Kansas CityStar reporter,
who had interviewed Dole, says, "One of his group pulled the pin on a hand
grenade and threw it.... A small grenade fragment cut into Dole's leg and
lightly injured several others. The men were patched up and each was awarded
a Purple Heart."

Most significant, in a 1982 Washingtonian article currently being
distributed by the Dole campaign, which Dole praises in a cover letter as
"events brilliantly captured in print by my friend Noel Koch," Koch says
nothing about Dole's errant toss of the grenade. Rather, he quotes Dole
as saying, "I think one of ours might have bounced off a tree and rolled
back.... Sometimes it was like a shooting gallery in the dark. You didn't
know where the stuff was coming from or whose it was." Apparently, Dole
approved this revisionist version.

In opposition to his company commander's orders, Dole led an assault
on a German machine-gun nest. There are conflicting versions of
how Dole came to lead the April 14 assault in which he was wounded. First,
there is strong disagreement over who was Dole's platoon sergeant, his second
in command. Dole, who should know, identifies him in his autobiography as
"my second in command, Platoon Sergeant Stan Kuschick." But Thompson and
Cramer write that Dole took over from Sergeant Carafa, who has told various
biographers and journalists that he had been acting platoon commander for
sixteen months, which is difficult to believe since normal Army procedure
would be to send in a replacement officer well before that time -- particularly
if the platoon was going into a major battle, as it did in the drive for
Monte Belvedere. When I raised this with Carafa in a recent interview, he
stuck to his story.

The reason the identity of Dole's number two is important is that Carafa
is the source of the oft-repeated story establishing Dole's courage and
fighting spirit. Carafa has told biographers that the company commander
had ordered him to lead an attack on a machine-gun nest, with Dole providing
covering fire, but that Dole volunteered to lead it instead. Carafa, now
74, recently gave a somewhat modified version of the circumstances under
which Dole came to lead the attack. Carafa now says that the company commander
merely suggested that he command the squad because he had been acting platoon
leader before Dole arrived. When they returned to the platoon and explained
the mission, "Dole said he would take the squad and I would give him
covering fire." Carafa agreed that it was Dole's duty to lead the attack,
since he was the platoon leader. Yet in an interview, another member of
Dole's company, who prefers to remain anonymous, characterized Carafa's
memory of the incident as containing inaccuracies.

Cramer makes no reference to Carafa's story in his description of the same
action. He says simply, "Dole could have stayed in the middle [of the platoon],
too. But he knew his job, and he did it." Out of modesty, perhaps, Dole
is reticent about the incident in his autobiography, quoting Carafa's account
and then saying, "I don't remember the exact sequence myself."

Dole was wounded while trying to drag his fallen radioman into
a shell hole. Company I's objective was to capture Hill 913, but
as the men proceeded down a slope, they immediately ran into mine fields
and intense enemy fire raking a clearing they had to cross. The time was
about 10:30 A.M. on April 14. Dole writes that in the course of the attack
various members of his platoon were hit, and he threw a grenade at the machine-gun
nest, then dove into a shell hole for protection. "From where I crouched,"
he continues, "I could see my platoon's radio man go down.... After pulling
his lifeless form into the foxhole, I scrambled back out again. As I did,
I felt a sharp sting in my upper right back." Thus, his wound came after
he had pulled the radioman into the shell hole.

The "Bob Dole Story" on the Dole for President homepage on the Internet
gives this account a slightly more heroic twist: "In the middle of heavy
shelling, Lieutenant Dole saw his radioman go down. As he crawled out of
his foxhole to try to rescue the wounded soldier, he was hit by Nazi machine
gun fire." Katharine Seelye, writing in The New York Times on the
fifty-first anniversary of the incident, relates a similar version, only
she says he was hit "by a shell or bullet or cannon fire -- there was too
much flying metal to know." These versions make Dole's commendable action
more admirably sacrificial.

Since Dole says he does not remember what happened next, perhaps because
he was given morphine, we must rely on the accounts of Nencioni, Kuschick,
Carafa and Jennings. But the recollections of fifty years after the event
must be approached with caution. Kuschick, for example, was quoted in a
1992 book, Soldiers on Skis, as saying the wound that crippled Dole
occurred when their platoon was sent out on a night patrol to capture a
prisoner. "It was dark, we took them by surprise, and then there was a firefight....
Bob, in what was a gutsy move, led the platoon up front with two scouts.
Machine-gun fire killed the scouts and hit Bob. I went to him and saw he
was barely alive. He looked gray." Dole, who wrote the foreword to this
book and presumably saw the galleys, for some reason failed to correct Kuschick's
story.

Dole's heroic leadership helped the 10th Division crack the German
mountain defenses. Summing up Dole's achievements, Hilton extravagantly
claims, "Dole's leadership qualities were an important ingredient in the
10th Mountain Division's relentless drive to mop up the tail end of German
troops still clinging desperately to the mountains of northern Italy." The
truth is that Dole's company took heavy casualties from mines and enemy
fire -- without achieving its objective. Two of the four platoon lieutenants
were killed in action. The regimental historian, Woodruff, mentions Dole
was "seriously wounded during the attack" but gives no indication that he
did anything remarkable in that combat. The battalion commander ordered
Company K to pass through Company I and attack Hill 913 from another direction.
Dole was put out of action so quickly that his contribution to the 10th
Division's smashing of the German Gothic line was tragically brief.

Dole was awarded two medals for heroism. Dole's homepage
on the Internet and handouts from the Dole for President campaign credit
him with two Bronze Stars without producing any citations. The Army's Personnel
Records Center says he received only one, and his separation notice confirms
this. It appears that if Dole received two Bronze Stars, the second would
have been awarded under a policy introduced in 1947 in which the medal was
automatically given to all holders of the Combat Infantryman's Badge. In
other words, Dole's second award was simply for being in combat -- not,
as with Bronze Stars awarded in wartime, for "heroic" or "meritorious" conduct.

In the April 14 attack Dole did his duty, but his actions were hardly the
stuff of heroism. It was his job to lead his platoon, and dragging a wounded
(or dead) comrade into one's shell hole was a common occurrence in the heat
of battle. Even the friendly chronicler Noel Koch wonders why a war wound
invests the bearer with an aura of heroism. "Heroism," he says, "involves
choices, and Dole perceived no choice between leading his men and not leading
them." As a member of Dole's platoon, Stanley Jones, put it in a recent
interview, Dole "was a good soldier, but no more a hero than any other soldier."

Dole was promoted to first lieutenant in April 1946 and to captain in February
1947 even though he had been undergoing operations and rehabilitation in
hospitals for the past two years. Hilton says that Dole referred to the
second of these advancements as a "bedpan promotion."

And so the truth about Dole's war record is considerably less than awe-inspiring.
Yet the myth endures, and with the candidate running on the contrast between
his and Clinton's military record, his campaign isn't eager to give a more
accurate account. Dole, at the behest of his handlers, is less reticent
about his service than in the past, but he mainly speaks about his wound
and rehabilitation. He has passed up several opportunities to correct the
exaggerated versions in biographies, and in the case of his self-wounding
has even approved a sanitized account in which his maladroitly hurled grenade
goes unnoted. Journalists continue to portray him as a hero, winner of two
Bronze Stars. Joe Klein, for example, writes in Newseek that Dole
knows "what guns do. He also knows what politicians do, which is rarely
anything quite so dramatic as leading an army into battle." Such attempts
to make political capital out of Dole's war service go beyond the respect
due him for the role he played as a soldier with the 10th Mountain Division.

Robert B. Ellis, a retired Central Intelligence Agency officer,
is now a wildlife photographer and environmental activist. One of the original
ski troop volunteers, he received a Bronze Star for his service with the
10th Mountain Division in World War II. He is the author of a memoir of
that service, See Naples and Die (McFarland).

Copyright (c) 1996, The Nation Company, L.P.
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